Tag Archives: Featured

USD/CHF The USDCHF pair traded negatively yesterday to break 0.9488 and settles below it, which stops the positive effect of the recently mentioned bullish pattern and push the price to decline again, targeting heading towards 0.9373 initially. Therefore, the bearish bias will be expected for today unless the price managed to breach 0.9488 and hold above it again, as breaching it will extend the correctional bullish...

Switzerland’s power grid is part of a large pool of ebbing and flowing electricity spanning 25 countries, known as the Continental European (EC) power grid. © Mauro77photo | Dreamstime.com - Click to enlarge Enough electricity must be fed into it to keep it at a stable frequency. The EC’s magic number is 50 Hz. Maintaining this requires a carefully coordinated trans-national balancing act. When electricity consumption...

Lukas Reimann, a parliamentarian and member of the Swiss Peoples Party (UDC/SVP), fought to have parliamentarians paid by health companies partially excluded from government commissions dealing with health issues. © Martin Šandera | Dreamstime.com - Click to enlarge He thinks vested interests are behind high health premiums and that cartels must be broken. According to him 23 out of 25 of the members on such health...

By far, the easiest to answer for today’s inflation/boom trifecta is China’s CPI. At 2.9% in February 2018, that’s the closest it has come to the government’s definition of price stability (3%) since October 2013. That, in the mainstream, demands the description “hot” if not “sizzling” even though it still undershoots. The primary reason behind the seeming acceleration was a more intense move in food prices. Rising...

Lord, Grant us Chastity and Temperance… Just Not Yet! Most fund managers are in an unenviable situation nowadays (particularly if they have a long only mandate). On the one hand, they would love to get an opportunity to buy assets at reasonable prices. On the other hand, should asset prices actually return to levels that could be remotely termed “reasonable”, they would be saddled with staggering losses from their...

The ECB made one small change to its communication in March consistent with a normalisation process that is likely to remain very gradual. In line with our expectations, today the Governing Council (unanimously) decided to drop its commitment to increase asset purchases “in terms of size and/or duration” if needed, which had steadily become more difficult to justify and less credible anyway. In effect, the ECB has...

For the first time since 2009 the percentage of women in top management positions has decreased (Keystone) - Click to enlarge The percentage of women in top executive positions dropped slightly in Switzerland last year, a report has found. The annual survey by the Schilling human resource consultancyexternal link shows a 1% drop to 7% in 2017 compared with the previous year. In 2016, the share of women in...

Stock Market Selloff Showed Gold Can Reduce Portfolio Risk  – Recent stock market selloff showed gold can deliver returns and reduce portfolio risk– Gold’s performance during stock market selloff was consistent with historical behaviour– Gold up nearly 10% in last year but performance during recent selloff was short-lived– The stronger the market pullback, the stronger gold’s rally– WGC: ‘a good time for investors to...

There is no change to the risk budget this month. For the moderate risk investor the allocation to bonds is 50%, risk assets 45% and cash 5%. We have had continued volatility since the last update but the market action so far is pretty mundane. The initial selloff halted at the 200 day moving average and the rebound carried to just over the 50 day moving average. That is about “as expected” as you can get for a stock...

Spring is around the corner in the Northern Hemisphere, and with it, a sense of a Goldilocks moment.  Growth is sufficiently strong to see employment grow and absorb the economic slack.  In the US, the participation rate of the key 25-54 aged demographic group has risen and now stands at 89.3%, the highest since 2010.  Europe enjoys the broadest economic expansion in more than a decade, and while Japanese growth has not...